Buying a Premium Domain on GoDaddy: End User Perspective

Simplicity helps end user buy domain name.

In October I wrote regarding GoDaddy’s service that lets you place your domains for sale within the registration path, called Premium Domain Names. Using a “Premium Listing”, your domain shows up in the GoDaddy domain marketplace. But the real value is that they also show up prominently when someone is searching for that exact domain name:

To test the system, I transferred regarding 75 domain names to GoDaddy and listed them as Premium, with a median price of regarding $1,000. It’s a modest sample size, and I didn’t expect much to happen. But a few days ago I received this email:

Curious, I called up the person who bought the domain name, who told me his thought process and how he came across the domain. (He requested his name not be used in this article.)

“Most of the names I was looking up were taken,” he told me. “But the others didn’t come up as ‘premium names'”.

He stated that if some of the other names he tried were listed as available as a premium domain, he may have bought one of the others.

This brings up a good point: most end users don’t know how to find out if a domain name is for sale. Even if they do, they don’t want to bother with the traditional process of negotiation, escrow, etc. Part of the selling point to this buyer was that it was simple and instantaneous:

“It was super simple,” he explained. “It was really no different than buying another domain on GoDaddy.”

Premium domain sales are automatically transferred to the buyer’s account upon purchase.

GoDaddy has the greatest retail reach in the domain name business. Domainers are starting to take advantage of that.